…and I’m not alone.
I’ve made this comment before but it’s becoming more and more clear that Facebook has killed my Windows Live blog, and not just mine, but other peoples personal blogs as well.
Certainly there are bloggers who continue to update and build rich personal or special interest blogs but I can’t help feeling that Facebook has Wall-marted the personal blog space. And to a larger extent I wonder about what the equivilant of the memories held in a shoe-box full of old photos will be in the future, and I’m pretty sure it’s not Facebook.
To it’s credit, Facebook has compelled way more people to use the web to update coworkers, friends and family about their lives, at least I think that’s to their credit. However it’s done so by reinforcing the cream-skimming, high sugar/fat/salt content, lowest price lure that homogenized America has increasingly become addicted to. It’s wham here’s a couple of pictures, bam here’s a quick comment, thank you M’am memory collecting.
To be fair, most personal blogs went mainly un-read or read only by a very few people, including of course the authors themselves. They did tend however to tell much more of a story, provide more depth and commentary and really build a collection of memories. Kind of like the difference between morning radio news programs where you get the top sound bites repeated every 15 minutes vs NPR where there is less volume of stories, but much more depth and detail.
Or maybe more like the difference between taking digital photos with your cell phone vs 35mm film that needed to be developed. With 35mm you took your time, you were selective with what you photographed, and you worked to make each photo important, significant and memorable. With your phone you’re as likely to snap a picture of some seemingly eclectic shaped cantaloupe in your local market as you are capturing a photo of your children on their first day of school.
With Facebook the important stuff gets mixed in with the mundane, the stuff worth remembering gets lost with the stuff that’s probably not really even worth commenting on. And it all slips away in a vast stream of consciousness that would take hours or days to wade through, if anyone even wanted to take the time to do so, and if you trusted the fact that Facebook really cared about preserving your memories to keep them around very long.
Admittedly, my blog was a fairly self absorbed documentation of moments, times, experiences and people that I thought were important enough to document. Important enough that I would take the 10-20 minutes necessary to create the post. Most likely they bored anyone who happened by but to me they were important, to me they were the things I cared about, to me they were the things I wanted to preserve.
Maybe it’s the fact that on Fathers day, digging through a shoebox of old photos looking for a picture of my Dad, I was reminded that the move to digital threatens to potentially obsolete that emotional and visceral feeling we get looking through old photos. The running upstairs with a fistfull of pictures to our kids saying “oh my God, look at this”. It’s not to say digital in and of itself is the threat. Digital is awesome, you can share and copy, you can give each of your children a complete set of family photos, and tagged correctly can provide ways to search, find and group photos like never before. It’s not digital, it’s the not taking the time to make those photos count, or mixing the important in with the mundane, that presents the challenge.
And maybe that’s why in the back of my mind I have this tugging fear about Facebook. Not that Facebook is intentionally a bad thing anymore than McDonalds or Burger King are intentionally bad things. I mean everyone loves milkshakes and fries, they make us very happy for a few moments. But then one day we look down and realize that what we thought was a good thing actually has taken part of our lives away.
But then again, I could be wrong…
clarkb... 